57. MENDEDESIGN
The Loeb Fellowship is a Harvard Graduate School of Design grant given to 10 individuals—architects, developers, urban planners—practitioners who, explains designer Jeremy Mende, “work directly with issues that shape the built environment. This art/design critical language was developed to question the idea—and value—of what our environment is actually made of.”

Each of the fellows received a disposable camera in the mail with instructions on what to shoot. Anything would do, from the fellow’s feet to the nearest signage. “These small collections of photographs,” Mende says, “would stand as personal and idiosyncratic documents contrasting the more official written bios.” The firm’s process led them to “build” the graphic language out of actual construction materials rather than attempting to “design” it in 2D. “We purposefully sourced the most banal building materials we could find—cheap wood veneer, medium density fiber board, drywall, and plastic laminate,” Mende explains. “Beauty can be forgettable in a visual world where surface is so highly engineered, so we wanted it to be ugly—a strange ugliness that suggests a questioning of aestheticism—hence the purposefully awkward approach to form and color.”
Dana Rouse